Friday, October 25, 2013

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[University of Oklahoma historian Kyle Harper] Climatatic fluctuation has been one of the major drivers of all global history, of the history of life on earth, and of human history, in particular, and coming to understand the massive fluctuations that have affected the human species upwards history is very much a part of the kind of present agenda to understand the history of the climate and the dynamics of the climate, and climate fluctuation in a richer sense, and so, we as historians, of a period like the Roman Empire, have been great beneficiaries of this because there are a lot of smart people around the world trying to use ice cores, trying to use tree rings, trying to use speleothems, cave deposits, trying to use other kinds of proxy evidence to understand the history of climate variability, and it’s giving us an almost unimaginably rich picture of climate and climate change in a period like the Roman Empire.

The very basis of the argument warning against a change in climate is that climate should never change. This is an absurdity in itself. We grew up learning about ice ages and times of a worldwide subtropical climate, and we’re supposed to freak out about a change in temperature?